{"id":32869,"date":"2025-07-02T15:08:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T15:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/32869\/"},"modified":"2025-07-02T15:08:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T15:08:08","slug":"snake-on-a-plane-delays-a-flight-in-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/32869\/","title":{"rendered":"Snake on a plane delays a flight in Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"

MELBOURNE, Australia — An Australian domestic flight was delayed for two hours after a stowaway snake<\/a> was found in the plane\u2019s cargo hold, officials said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The snake was found on Tuesday as passengers were boarding Virgin Australia Flight VA337 at Melbourne Airport bound for Brisbane, according to snake catcher Mark Pelley.<\/p>\n

The snake turned out to be a harmless 60-centimeter (2-foot) green tree snake. But Pelly said he thought it could be venomous when he approached it in the darkened hold.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t until after I caught the snake that I realized that it wasn\u2019t venomous. Until that point, it looked very dangerous to me,\u201d Pelley said.<\/p>\n

Most of the world\u2019s most venomous snakes are native to Australia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Pelley entered the cargo hold, the snake was half hidden behind a panel and could have disappeared deeper into the plane.<\/p>\n

Pelley said he told an aircraft engineer and airline staff that they would have to evacuate the aircraft if the snake disappeared inside the plane.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said to them if I don\u2019t get this in one shot, it\u2019s going to sneak through the panels and you\u2019re going to have to evacuate the plane because at that stage I did not know what kind of snake it was,\u201d Pelley said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut thankfully, I got it on the first try and captured it,\u201d Pelley added. \u201cIf I didn\u2019t get it that first time, the engineers and I would be pulling apart a (Boeing) 737 looking for a snake still right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pelley said he had taken 30 minutes to drive to the airport and was then delayed by security before he could reach the airliner.<\/p>\n

An airline official said the flight was delayed around two hours.<\/p>\n

Because the snake is native to the Brisbane region, Pelley suspects it came aboard inside a passenger\u2019s luggage and escaped during the two-hour flight from Brisbane to Melbourne.<\/p>\n

For quarantine reasons, the snake can\u2019t be returned to the wild.<\/p>\n

The snake, which is a protected species, has been given to a Melbourne veterinarian to find a home with a licensed snake keeper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MELBOURNE, Australia — An Australian domestic flight was delayed for two hours after a stowaway snake was found…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":32870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3184,27592,3425,347,57,50,15228,103,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-32869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-snakes","9":"tag-27592","10":"tag-animals","11":"tag-article","12":"tag-general-news","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-oddities","15":"tag-world","16":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114784272764342323","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}